The move was backed by a
deeply slanted UN security council resolution, which the Saudis and other
regional monarchies took a leading role in drafting, and which was then
rubber-stamped by their western allies.

The cost of the blockade imposed on Yemen, the region’s
poorest country, by the Saudis and their oil-rich friends, was dramatically
illustrated on the front page of The Times on Friday, in a shocking photo of 18-year-old Saida Ahmad
Baghili, whose body is so emaciated that one can scarcely believe she’s alive.

Baghili lives near Hodeida, where a third of local infants suffer from acute
malnutrition, and where residents were reduced to eating grass and drinking
seawater after the coalition bombed Hodeida itself, Yemen’s major entry point
for aid and food imports.

UN officials report that
the coalition often blocks or delays deliveries of even explicitly UN-approved
food and medical supplies.

All sides in the conflict have been guilty of siege
tactics and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, but the coalition is
responsible for the vast majority of the suffering, and the coalition is the
side that Britain is actively supporting.

Indeed, Whitehall has approved £3.3bn
of arms exports (including bombs and missiles) to Saudi Arabia since
the intervention began, a huge rise on the equivalent preceding period.

So you might think the Labour leadership’s
demand that British support should be suspended, until the Saudis can be shown
to be acting in accordance with international law and basic morality, would be
an uncontroversial one.

Apparently not.

Presenting the motion in the
Commons, Thornberry was subjected to a series of ill-judged interruptions from
Labour MPs such as Kevan Jones, Toby Perkins and John Woodcock.

Indeed,
Thornberry received more vocal support in the chamber from the SNP contingent
than from her own supposed comrades.

According to subsequent
reports, some Labour members even tried to work with their Tory
counterparts in order to defeat their own party’s motion.

Woodcock, a former chair of Progress, claimed that British
support is “precisely focused on training Saudis” to improve their targeting,
so as to “create fewer civilian casualties”, parroting the official government
line.

The idea that the Saudis’ “widespread and systematic” attacks on civilian
targets are just a series of well-meaning errors is one that, to put it as
gently as possible, lacks credibility.

And if decades of training provided by
the British to the Saudi pilots hasn’t prevented these supposed errors by now,
it seems rather unlikely that it will in the near future.